Hey Five Thirty Eight: Here's The GOP ECIT (Evil/Crazy/Ignorant/Tool) Analysis

Above: A Helpful Chart of Reprehensible Personal Characteristics of Republican Candidates.


Introducing the ECIT. It works like this, with 1-10 ratings, 10 being most.


"Mitt" Romney-  Evil (7), Crazy (5), Ignorant (4), Tool (9),
Ron Paul- Evil (4), Crazy (9), Ignorant (4), Tool (2)
Rick Perry- Evil (8), Crazy (6), Ignorant (8), Tool (8)
John Huntsman:  E (4), C (3), I (2), T (7)
Michelle Bachman: E (5), C (8), I (9), T (4)
Tim Pawlenty, E (3), T, (7), I (4), T (6)  (Out. Likely Cause: Insufficient ECIT factor)
Sarah Palin, Evil (9), Crazy (8), Ignorant (10), Tool (8)
Herb Cain, E (3), C (5), I (6), T (5)
Newt Gingrich, E (9), C (6), I (5), Tool (9)
Rick Santorum, Evil (6), C (6), T (6), I (8)


BASE COMPARISONS:
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Ronald Reagan- E (4), C (5), I (7), T (5)
George W. Bush- E (8), C (7), I  (8), T (9)
Barack Obama- E (1), C (1), I (1), T (3) 
Bill Clinton-  E (3), C (3), I (1), T (5)
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Definitions:

Evil. Degree of indifference to common moral standards. A "10" would be happy to sell her services as President to China for the right price.
Crazy. Sincere belief in statements which are clearly and reasonably demonstrably false, including self-delusions. (Note the Clinton score of "3,")  Belief in God for example is not demonstrably false, although rigorously materialist evidence is lacking; however, belief that tiny alien robots put the U.S. off the gold standard is.
Ignorant. Lack of essential awareness of history, politics and government, economics, business, society, geography, arts, and sciences. I would set 10 as an average high-school drop-out. Note that no distinction has been made between willful ignorance, such as Romney's situationally-dependent factual fluidity, and actual stupidity, such as Rick Perry.
Tool. Willingness to serve the agenda of others to the contrary interest of one's social, spiritual and moral beliefs.

Disputes to the values I have assigned are natural. I struggled between rating the President on 3 or 4 on the tool factor, higher than Ron Paul, for example. Ron Paul has the courage of his convictions to the point it bumps up his crazy factor significantly.  It's difficult to imagine a sitting U.S. president with a score of 1 or 2 here,  but I believe Obama's lack of active evil is accurate and remarkable; only Jimmy Carter, in recent times, would match this.  On toolness, Thomas Jefferson, not the most perfectly ethical of men, might well score at 1 or 2- any man who writes his own version of the Bible while in the White House to counter his Christianist enemies can hardly be cited for lacking conviction.

A higher ECIT factor, which essentially a measure of contempt-ability, correlates well with the degree to which they must be politically opposed.  But how predictive of Republican nomination is an ECIT score? A 10 on all factors would likely be prohibitive even for the Republican party. (The fascist Ann Coulter, for example, would score roughly 35.) But an excessively low score would be also well correlated with a lack of success.

ESTIMATED MAXIMUM ECIT Score to possibly reach GOP nomination (0-40, presuming all factors are weighted equally): 33.  Bad news for Palin, who is too contemptible. As EST. MINIMUM: 21, it's bad news for Ron Paul, Herb Cain, and John Huntsman, who are not contemptible enough. 

So, up to a certain point,  the contemporary GOP nomination will generally go to those within the Golden Old Range, from the the Reaganite 21 up to what we might call the Bushian Demarcation of 33. 

The insights are interesting. Gingrich, who's evil rating of 9 may be an underestimate, scores a solid 29, but I suspect to succeed he would need to bump up his apparent ignorance, which would have the happy effect of bumping up his astronomical tool rating - a 9 already retarded only by his own self-regard.

Gingrich is a problem, because I would normally predict that the tool rating is an important factor in securing the GOP nomination, and this has a recent example:  McCain's 2008 primary campaign was dominated by his increasingly energetic and eventually successful attempt to bolster his relatively low tool factor of 5 for Republican to a high tool factor of 8.  Weighting here requires more study.

Another insight is the surprising performance of Bachman. The apparent sincerity of her stupid, malicious beliefs is a point in her favor, keeping her well within the Bushian Demarcation, unlike Palin, who has exceeded it with a score of 35, by ignorance, evil, and pathological lying.

Unfortunately, Bachman's greater early success over Gingrich, who has a distressing comparable score, suggests another factor entirely, possibly charisma (in this matchup, a basically attractive if alarmingly brittle woman vs. an unholy frog-faced life-sucking gargoyle) but the ECIT is a particular, rigorous mockery of a study of truly contemptible personal attributes as a strong predictive factor in the likelyhood of national political success in the GOP, rather than a matter of personal aesthetics. 

Several questions: how do we weight these four factors? Is the predictive quality the peak of the curve between 21 and 33, or a maximization toward either end, or is it simply a necessary range threshold? And since I have defined the problem without research I don't have time for in such a way that my analysis must be correct, how can I convince others to do my work for me?